art by PSHoudini

(Here’s a New Year’s Day opinion piece by Andy Synn.)

There’s been a lot of chat recently (actually, I suppose it’s a pretty constant state of affairs) about what is or, more frequently, what isn’t Metal. In fact you’d be hard-pressed to go very long at all in this scene without encountering someone willing to tell you how you’re “doing Metal wrong”, and happy to lay out a list of all the Heavy Metal Commandments which a good metalhead should adhere to.

And yet, somehow the irony of this goes right over their heads. The same people who preach the inviolable laws of “Metal” (which, strangely enough, always seem to apply solely to the things they do and the bands they like), are the same people who harp on about the evils of religion and blind faith. Whether it’s willful denial or simple ignorance, I don’t know, but it’s absolutely mind-boggling to me.

You see, not to be too blunt and simplistic about it, Heavy Metal is, at its heart, just a musical genre. And quite a varied one at that. But still, a defined genre. One based around loud, distorted guitars, hammering drums and (ideally) a palpable sense of passion and fire.

Yet there’s also an idea that it’s something more than that – that it’s something almost like a religious movement, that it’s a culture, something that exists independently – and somehow questioning this assertion is, in itself, “unmetal”.

In fact, certain people particularly don’t like it when you start to question what Metal is… Continue reading »